Authorgraph 270: Jamie Smart

Jamie Smart interviewed by Paul Gravett

It’s happened to me twice now – on a train from Windermere and on the tube in London. I’ve noticed parents giving the latest Bunny vs. Monkey book to their kids, who are so excited they can’t wait to plunge in. Children in Britain love Jamie Smart’s zany, inventive comics a lot. They have turned his Bunny vs. Monkey series, published in the weekly comic The Phoenix and then adapted into 250+-page volumes from David Fickling Books, into a best-selling phenomenon, second only in the UK to Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper. What’s more, last year Jamie was awarded both Illustrator and Children’s Illustrated Book of the Year categories in the British Book Awards. Jamie is no overnight success, having worked for The Dandy and Funday Times and alternative American comic books. But it’s been in The DFC in 2008-9, then The Phoenix since 2012, that his wackiness was unleashed and found an eager young audience. So enthusiastic that his live comics-making workshops for kids sell out almost instantly. Jamie kindly found time to chat from his studio:

PG: I watched one of your workshops online. You open by asking ‘Who likes making comics?’ and the whole audience of kids erupts and cheers!

JS: Yes, it feels incredible! We had a dip for the last few decades, when kids haven’t been engaging with comics. And yet all of us in the comics industry know kids love comics. They just need to be shown them. And that’s finally happening, it’s wonderful.

PG: As a fresh, independent British weekly, The DFC (or David Fickling Comics) was a big opportunity, wasn’t it?

JS: Yes, they said ‘Come up with a cool character and play around with it every week’. I was having fun doing Fish-Head Steve and The DFC encouraged that. And that’s all a kids’ comic can really ask for, to get the artists to give their best characters and jokes. The DFC felt like a training ground for The Phoenix, which I joined from issue 0 and have there ever since, over 10 years now,

PG: These days it’s remarkable it’s lasted near 700 issues.

JS: I was exceedingly lucky growing up in the 1980s, when I could go into a newsagents and buy loads of different comics. But then we abandoned the kids in the 1990s and early 2000s, because publishers wanted to turn their comics into magazines. And they weren’t giving kids stories. I want publishers, artists and the public to understand the heritage we have as a country in making comics and to start a new phase and become the envy of the world again. That would be incredible.

PG: Teachers have told me about their pupils who are reluctant readers have had no experience growing up reading comics. So it’s encouraging that recent reports from BookTrust and others confirm that comics encourage literacy.

JS: It’s felt like you’re converting one kid at a time to comics, but in the last few years, it seems to have accelerated and publishers are putting out comics and telling kids how great comics are. It’s not just telling a funny story with bright colours and silly animals. There’s a beating heart in a comic, that is very much direct from the artist to the reader, it comes through the page. You can see a child suddenly realise that and recognise their own experience in something they’re reading, and then even better, learning ‘I can draw things too, I can tell my own stories’.

PG: In your workshops you make it clear that you start with very simple shapes.

JS: I’m always at pain to tell kids that these are squares and circles. Now obviously I’ve been drawing for decades, so they got defined and honed, but all I started with was basic shapes. I remember when I started learning to play guitar, I was amazed how all these songs I’d loved were made-up of little notes going up and down. When you can peek behind and see the mechanisms, you realise you can make your own. That’s the revelatory moment for a lot of children – ‘I can do this’. A comic book is not an untouchable thing, it’s not a Holy Grail. Give it another 5-10 years and I think we’ll start seeing artists who are heavily influenced by The Phoenix coming to it, which would be amazing.

PG: I gather you were big fan of science fiction?

JS: Yes, I loved the ideas. I didn’t understand the mechanics, but I loved the the romance of things like time travel and dimensions. As a kid, my dad bought me New Scientist, Focus and things like that. I loved reading them. I didn’t understand everything, I just loved the knowledge and ideas. As a teenager, I got into Red Dwarf, a perfect example of science fiction and comedy, that influenced me quite a lot. I was terrified of Doctor Who as a kid but got back into it in the early Matt Smith days and stuck with it ever since. Again, that’s doing science fiction in a very digestible, glossy way. So I want to tell these big stories, and make kids think about these big ideas. But through the medium of cute animals wearing underpants.

PG: What’s your schedule like on Bunny vs Monkey?

JS: Bunny vs. Monkey is ongoing for nine months every year with a book at the end. That’s 2 pages, which takes me about a day to pencil and ink. I just keep doing it, hopefully till I’m old and retired. I’m lucky now that I work with talented colourists who make the pages look beautiful. That’s given me 50% more time.

PG: And in 2022 you added Looshkin in The Maddest Cat in the World. Looshkin goes back to your American comic books for Slave Labor Graphics.

JS: It’s quite a different beast. I drew a cat and just wrote Looshkin under it. I have no idea where the name came from, perhaps based on the name Lucian. I had a cat when I was young and I called him Snoopy for some bizarre reason. He ran away eventually. I’ve got a dog at the moment. I’m more of a dog person than a cat person, but I’m drawing cats for some reason. For me dogs are not as fun to draw because they’re of their ears. You draw a cat, it’s a circle and two triangles. A dog has a more boney, ‘foldy’ face, it’s not as cute for me to draw.

PG: Now there’s also Super Duper Bunny League animated on Nickelodeon. How do you balance so many projects?

JS: Often I’m jumping from one project to another day by day, which keeps your brain ticking over. If you work on something for months, you can get stuck and the work isn’t as good because you’re not freshening it up each day you come back to it. So it’s a very random schedule. I just know I’ve got a deadline and I’ll get to it.

PG: How did your Max and Chaffy series for younger readers come about?

JS: That’s based around Chaffy, a character I came up with for a real toy, for people to photograph when they travelled around the world and send photos of where their Chaffies turned up. I did picture books with it, there’s websites, animations and two Find Chaffy picture search books, like Where’s Wally? I thought it would be fun to tell these people’s stories through this creature they discover. So I pitched it to David Fickling Books for younger readers and they said yes. We’ve just finished Book 5 and they are very easy to read, each page is two panels and one speech bubble here and there. They’re so much fun to make, because you know you’re getting comics into the hands of even younger readers. And the reason? So hopefully they go on to read comics for the rest of their lives!

PG: So why all these bunnies?

JS: At school, about 7 years old, we had to write a ‘What I did in the holidays’ essay. I wrote about going to a petting zoo and how I liked the bunnies. My teacher said bunnies isn’t a real word, use rabbit. She told me off and marked me down and ever since it’s stuck in my head. I wanted to do something with bunnies, so went and made a book and a bestseller. I don’t know if she’s still with us, but I wish I could show her what I’ve done.

Paul Gravett is a London-based writer, historian, curator and lecturer specialising in international comics art. He has written, co-written, edited or contributed to over twenty books about this field, as well as curating or co-curating numerous exhibitions, from The British Library, London and National Comics Centre in Angoulême, France to The Centre Pompidou, Paris and the first exhibition of Asian Comics for The Barbican Centre, currently touring museums in the USA. His upcoming projects include curating for the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, to open in London 2026, and for a forthcoming museum of graphic narrative in Brussels. For more details visit www.paulgravett.com

The Bunny vs Monkey, Looshkin and Flember books are all published by David Fickling Books.